where mistakes were made, not necessarily
how to avoid error today. Every new choice
seems different.
Not too long after I had walked on the salt
fields on Mike Irvine's farm, I sat in a car in
Queensland, on the other side of the country,
with Henry Crothers, while a D-9 bulldozer
he'd hired rumbled its way across land that
had recently been woodland. He had made a
decision like Mike Irvine's father had. He was
clearing the paddock.
While I was in Australia, land in Queensland
was being cleared at an estimated rate of
840,000 acres a year-more than one and a half
acres a minute. It was one of the highest rates
of land clearing anywhere in the world. Some,
like 900 acres of Crothers's land, was going into
irrigated cotton.
Yet Australia's past suggests that further
clearing of land might be a mistake. "It's abso
lutely scandalous," Mary White told me. But to
me it didn't look that straightforward.
Henry Crothers knew all about this opposi
tion. "With all the talk about the environment,"
he said, "if you're not aware of it, you're a
bloody idiot." To him and his community this
was not a disaster. It was the opposite-it was a
reprieve from oblivion.
Towns are fading away all over rural Austra
lia, which has lost nearly 500 branch banks in
the past five years. Since 1997 bad farm debts in
Queensland alone have grown from $506,000
($311,300 U.S.) to $4,435,000.
"When the 1965 drought came, the wool
prices were already down," Crothers said as we
drove through the small town of Dirranbandi.
"We lost a lot of people, and they took houses
away. Until irrigation. The difference between
our town and a lot of others is that because of
irrigation it's come good again."
But because of irrigation, river waters are
being stretched thin.
Henry Crothers's new cotton farm, with its
two 500-million-gallon reservoirs, is in the
basin known as the Murray-Darling drainage.
I'd already been down to the mouth of the
Murray River, south of Adelaide. The drainage
basin that fills the Murray is among the largest
in the world, but almost nothing flows out
of the mouth. I had walked across a kind
of weir called a barrage and watched a modest
roll of brown water tumble through a gate
about 12 feet wide. The rest of the water had
evaporated upstream or been used by cities or
for irrigation.
Partly because of that irrigation, the
Murray-Darling Basin is in a state of perpet
ual trouble, with salt incursions, toxic algal
blooms, and dwindling flows. On occasion the
Murray has even stopped.
Yet who would not be proud to help life
come back to their town? "Things are happen
ing," Crothers said. "People are painting,
they're putting fences up, they're creating
employment, they're bringing in houses."
Only a short time ago this area was arid
ranchland. Now it looks like the Imperial Val
ley of California. But no one can be sure if this
is the making of a farming empire or the start
of something as bad as the Dust Bowl.
"What can we do?" Crothers asked. "If
people in the inland can't make a dollar, what
do you do with the land when they're all gone?
It's sort of a two-edged sword, I guess. So far, I
don't think we've done anything wrong. Not
seriously, anyway."
No one can challenge that statement with
certainty. Environmentalists say that farmers
are asking for a salt disaster in Queensland, but
landforms here have different drainage pat
terns and different soils from those where the
salt's bad. The bottom line is that there is not
enough information to know whether this is
tragic or farsighted.
"We badly need scientific proof of these
things that are worrying us," Mary White told
me. "We need somebody to do an eight-year
study. Why isn't the information really there to
tell us whether we are right or not?"
A recent report assessing the nation's envi
ronment strikes a similar chord: "Compared
with other developed nations, Australia has
only rudimentary information on the con
dition and productive capacity of its land."
In other words, what we should have known,
we don't yet know.
((
T'S LIKE YOU'RE REALLY A PART of
something," said Stewart Paton. He
was sitting by a campfire in southern
Western Australia with several young
men and women, including one who
said his name was Schroom Inappro
priate Moondog Pooh Bear. They ranged in age
from 16 to over 30 and were there to stop log
ging. They wore shabby clothes and smoked
AUSTRALIA-A HARSH AWAKENING